The central board also took official note of the adhesion of a new member who was already one of the AGBU’s biggest donors, Dikran Khan Kelegian. That same fiscal year, the Union made plans to found nine new schools, over and above the twenty elementary schools it was already running and the subsidies it provided to various educational associations and Armenian orphanages. It also granted peasants in the Mush and Mufarghine districts (in the Diyarbakir vilayet) substantial sums for the purchase of farmland, and distributed funds to the population of Sasun for the purchase of goats, cattle, and seed. In the field of health care, it subsidized the Armenian Hospital in Sivas and shipped medicine to Cilicia. In the area of social work, it created a badly needed system of assistance for the widows and orphans of Cilicia. Over the course of the year, it began construction of the teacher-training institute in Van, putting the work under the supervision of a local board headed by Bedros Kapamajian. The AGBU also forged plans to transform the Sanasarian Middle School in Erzerum into a college with a practically oriented agricultural and industrial curriculum. Finally, the central board decided to create a Central Library at its Cairo head office and to launch a monthly, Miutyun.37
In 1911, the AGBU’s Paris chapter was organized by Atanik Eknayan and R. Margosian, as were thirty-three more local chapters, in Milan, Bucharest, Constance, Varna, Balchik, Yetem, Cleveland, Lynn, Los Angeles, Tulare, Fowler, Saint Paul, San Francisco, Whitinsville, Haverhill, Fitchburg, ... Read all
The AGBU and its Mission, 1909-1912
Schoolchildren at the AGBU's primary school in Feke in 1912 (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).
12 August 1912 inauguration of the Bartevian School, built with an AGBU grant, in Eydeyli in the Yozkat district (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).